Rick Roberts as Martin and Lucy Peacock as Stevie in The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?David Hou/Stratford Festival
- Title: The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?
- Written by: Edward Albee
- Director: Dean Gabourie
- Actors: Rick Roberts, Lucy Peacock, Matthew Kabwe, Anthony Palermo
- Company: Stratford Festival
- Venue: Studio Theatre
- City: Stratford, Ont.
- Year: Runs to Sept. 29, 2024
Critic’s Pick
The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?, an unsettling 2002 play by the late American absurdist Edward Albee now on stage at the Stratford Festival, has so much repetition in it that it seems designed to make audience members ruminate on matters beyond the plot about a middle-aged man in a romance with a ruminant.
For example, it was hard while watching director Dean Gabourie’s crisp, well-acted production not to think back to the last time I saw this peculiar play about an architect whose life and career unravels after he falls in love with a goat – in Toronto and starring an actor who was about to be chewed up by scandal himself.
Then, in the fall of 2017, Soulpepper artistic director Albert Schultz programmed The Goat and chose to act in the lead role of Martin, who, like the actor was, is in his 50s and at the top of his profession.
The timing was uncanny: The week before that show opened, Soulpepper had become publicly embroiled in a #MeToo scandal related to the sexual predations of a frequent guest director from Hungary. Two months later, four actresses would sue Schultz himself for sexual harassment in what would become one of Canada’s most high-profile #MeToo cases. (The civil suit was settled out of court.)
Standing beside those women at their initial press conference were four actors offering support, one of whom was Rick Roberts – who is now playing Martin at Stratford.
In the opening scene, Martin confesses to his wife Stevie that he is having an affair with a goat.David Hou/Stratford Festival
Another uncanny coincidence or conscious casting? Perhaps Gabourie’s production is designed to be in conversation with the 2017 one as it even reuses the exact same controversial prop at the end.
The Goat is not one of those plays with a shocking secret revealed at the end – but a consideration of the aftermath of transgressions coming to light, or open secrets being acknowledged.
Probably, most audience members approaching the play for the first time at Stratford will think of the hard-to-digest recent news about Alice Munro over other accountability/cancel-culture stories.
In the opening scene, Martin confesses to his wife Stevie (Lucy Peacock) that he is having an affair with a goat. It’s clear to the audience he is telling the truth, but she laughs it off.
It’s easy to judge her – until, later on, when Martin hints about something even darker (yes, even darker) and each member of the audience must choose whether to ignore his words, laugh uneasily, or take them in with horror.
A key line comes from Stevie, who acted with a ferocity that makes you hungry to see Peacock in a genuine Greek tragedy again soon, when she is eventually forced to recognize reality.
“And so, I knew. And next, of course, came believing it. Knowing it – knowing it’s true is one thing, but believing what you know … well, that’s the tough part.”
The Goat explores how we judge those married to sexual predators (and that their initial emotional response to discovering this might be jealousy) – and also how we judge bystanders who choose to speak up sometimes even more than those who do not intervene.
Martin, as played by a vibrating Roberts, an expert at playing a man in love with his vices, is so full of anguish over his passion for the goat named Sylvia – which he describes as reciprocal – that he can almost seem sympathetic.David Hou/Stratford Festival
Also in the play are Martin and Stevie’s son Billy (Anthony Palermo), who is gay and whose sexuality is presented by Albee as an example of a former taboo in the process of becoming fully acceptable.
Then there’s Ross (Matthew Kabwe), Martin’s friend, who is there to speak of sexual transgressions he deems run-of-the-mill, from hiring prostitutes to cheating on spouses.
How do we distinguish between what is right and wrong, when what society deems right and wrong is constantly shifting?
(It struck me as a minor mistake on Gabourie and his design team’s part to muddle the time frame by having a character pull out an iPhone; this is a play useful to revisit precisely because it was written before gay marriage, before #MeToo, before some started reclassifying infidelity as abuse.)
Martin, as played by a vibrating Roberts, an expert at playing a man in love with his vices, is so full of anguish over his passion for the goat named Sylvia – which he describes as reciprocal – that he can almost seem sympathetic.
But there are hints that bestiality is a dramatic deke; one of the great ambiguous Albee lines he delivers, presenting himself as an otherwise noble husband, is: “I’ve had my hand a couple of places a couple of times, but I’ve never … done anything.”
The Goat strikes me as almost Brechtian in the way it constantly distances its audience; even at the height of their breakdowns, its self-conscious, intellectual characters take breaks to appreciate each other’s literary references or to point out a mixed metaphor.
But it’s a messageless play about a messy subject. If anything, Albee seems to be asking in his upended tragedy – that word comes from the ancient Greek for “goat song” by the way – why we’ve spent so much time in the theatre (never mind the media) fretting about the falls of great men and women anyway.